Valve has quietly removed links and references to Steam Machine game consoles from the hardware section and drop-down menu on the Steam site, raising new…
A Syber-made Steam Machine: a small custom PC that only plays games through Valve’s Steam.
Valve has quietly removed links and references to Steam Machine game consoles from the hardware section and drop-down menu on the Steam site, raising new questions about the future of the influential gaming platform’s third-party hardware initiative.
The references disappeared sometime around March 20, as reported by PC Gamer and other sites over the weekend. You can still find five available options for Steam Machines for sale on Steam if you search for them via Google, but the removal of the direct references and links is being taken as a sign that Valve, at best, isn’t putting a priority on the game consoles, and could be moving to phase them out.
Unveiled in January 2014 by Valve’s Gabe Newell, Steam Machines represented not only Valve’s entry into the PC hardware market, but an attempt to bring Steam and PC gaming into the living room. Before then, “couch gaming” — playing on a big TV, from your couch, with a controller — had been considered the exclusive domain of consoles like the PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo consoles.
Steam Machines were all built to be small enough to sit in your entertainment center and hook into your HD TV, letting you play your vast library of Steam games on PC with a wireless Steam Controller from the comfort of your couch.
However, in the intervening years, the Steam Machine failed to gain market traction. Valve has never released any official sales data, but journalists have theorized that under 500,000 Steam Machines were sold within seven months of its debut, despite Steam having as many as 125 million registered users. Part of the problem may have been that Valve’s own Steam Link does much of what you’d want from the Steam Machine — streaming games straight from your PC to the TV in your living room — for a bare fraction of the price of a Steam Machine.
The most crucial problem seems to have been, simply enough, that the SteamOS initially didn’t work very well; many developers didn’t support it, and many games took a sizable performance hit when running on SteamOS.
Back in July of 2012, Valve’s Gabe Newell spoke at the Casual Connect conference about his company’s dissatisfaction with the then-new Windows 8, infamously calling it “ a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space .” Due to what they saw as Microsoft exercising a worrying amount of control over PC gaming, Valve’s goal was to promote gaming on the open-source operating system Linux, in order to “ continue to make sure there are open platforms .”
We’ve contacted Valve for comment on the disappearance of the Steam Machine references, and will update this post with any additional information.
